2012 Kathleen LaPenta ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FARE LA LIBERTÀ, FARE LA STORIA: SICILIAN NARRATIVES OF THE RISORGIMENTO by KATHLEEN LAPENTA A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Italian written under the direction of Elizabeth Leake and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Fare la Libertà, Fare la Storia: Sicilian Narratives of the Risorgimento By KATHLEEN LAPENTA Dissertation Director: Elizabeth Leake This dissertation explores the intertextuality of the literary and cinematic versions of the 1860 uprising in Bronte, Sicily, and the trial of the peasants three years later. Taking into consideration the historical approach, which has attempted to retell, justify or explain the events surrounding the uprising in Bronte, my research focuses on the literary, historical and cinematic texts by authors and artists such as Giovanni Verga (1882), Benedetto Radice (1910), Leonardo Sciascia (1960, 1963) and by Florestano Vancini (1972). By analyzing the relationships between the different versions of this story, I illustrate how these narratives have shaped the residual tensions generated by conflicting perceptions of the events. These reconstructions, which span from 1882 to 2002, reflect a compulsive tendency to narrate a moment of revolt and repression that has become an emblem of the troubled foundations of the Italian nation and, more broadly speaking, they contemplate the points of contact between historical and literary texts and the role of each in constructing our notions of the past. ii Acknowledgment and Dedication I would like to thank my readers, Elizabeth Leake, Paola Gambarota, Andrea Baldi and Lucy Riall, each of whom dedicated endless amounts of time helping me develop my research and understand what this project is about. I would also like to extend a word of thanks to Simone Marchesi, with whom I worked through my initial ideas in many informal conversations. Finally, I could not have done this without the unwavering love and support of my husband, Chris, and our son, Samuel to whom this dissertation is dedicated. iii Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgment and Dedication iii Table of Contents iv List of Illustrations v Introduction 1 Chapter I: Carnivalesque and Easter imagery in Libertà and Nino Bixio a Bronte 29 Chapter II: Re-writing History: Inscribing Peasant Agency onto Bronte’s History 71 Chapter III: Refractions of Bronte 1860 in Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio 122 Conclusion: Facts and Fictions 157 Acknowledgment of Pending Publications 162 Bibliography 163 iv List of Illustrations 1. The Third of May, 1814 104 2. Bronte: Cronaca di un massacro che i libri di storia non hanno raccontato, 1972 104 3. Libertà e Giustizia, 1972 113 v 1 Introduction This dissertation explores the relationships between the literary, historical and cinematic representations of the 1860 peasant uprising in Bronte, Sicily and the trial of the peasants three years later. My analysis of the different versions of Bronte‟s revolt and trial, which span from 1882 to 2002, demonstrates how perceptions about historical moments are largely shaped by narratives of them. The texts I focus on reflect a compulsive tendency to reconstruct a moment of revolt and repression that occurred as the foundations for Italy‟s nation state were being laid and, in this way, they complicate the relationship between the national myths about Italy‟s movement for unification and the local heritage of Bronte. Though the historical events have been the subject of numerous analyses that seek to retell, justify or explain them, my project constitutes the first hermeneutic approach that puts these stories, which are different and yet the same, in contact with one another so as to examine their intertextuality. Historians trace the origins of the peasant revolt in Bronte to a long history of land conflict. In 1491 Bronte‟s common lands, located at the foot of Mount Etna, were illegally usurped by the Grand Hospital of Palermo. In 1799 Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies gifted the lands to Admiral Horatio Nelson as recompense for rescuing him and his family from Napoleon‟s army. In June 1860, after disembarking in Palermo, Sicily one month before, Giuseppe Garibaldi‟s Piedmontese government mandated the redistribution of ownership of common lands, and Bronte‟s town council refused to implement the legislated reform.1 1 For a thorough account of the vicissitudes in the ongoing and contentious land conflict that led up to the 1860 revolt, see Riall 1999. Riall‟s research contextualizes the 1860 conflict within the process of modernization, reflected by the rise of “an independent and assertive middle class which succeeded in dominating the community”(65). 2 In August, 1860 the peasant and working classes of Bronte, Sicily rose up against the members of the land-owning class in one of the many rebellions that occurred in southeastern Sicily as Garibaldi‟s troops came through the region. After seven days of conflict in Bronte, Nino Bixio, a general in Garibaldi‟s army, was sent to establish order. Bixio‟s orders for the immediate execution of five men deemed to be leaders of the rebellion and his imprisonment of many more of its participants, who were incarcerated until 1863 without being charged for a crime and who were subsequently sentenced to life in prison, remain a controversial subject for writers, artists, and historians in the local, national, international discourses. Over one hundred years later in October 1985, Bronte was the site of the posthumous trial in absentia of Bixio, which was conducted by the municipality and the students of Bronte‟s Collegio Capizzi. Including the texts generated as a result of the 1985 trial, over fifteen representations of the 1860 revolt and ensuing trials have been produced throughout the course of the late nineteenth, twentieth and into the twenty first centuries. Rendered in forms as diverse as the novella, historical memoir, essay and film, many of the representations were authored by nationally recognized Italian literary and artistic figures. In their distinct versions of Bronte‟s nineteenth century history, the texts by Giovanni Verga, Benedetto Radice, Leonardo Sciascia, Florestano Vancini, and Vincenzo Consolo have taken part in a discourse that explores the different ways of perceiving and remembering Italy‟s unification. Contemporaneous to these “national” texts, there have also been numerous representations of Bronte‟s history written and composed by Brontese citizens. Some of these include, but are not limited to Storia della città di Bronte by Gesualdo di Luca 3 (1883), a comprehensive history of the town dating back to antiquity; the “Difesa pronunziata d'innanti la Corte d'assisie del Circolo di Catania per la causa degli eccidii avvenuti nell'agosto 1860 in Bronte” (1863), the published transcript of the lawyer‟s defense of the men who were imprisoned in Catania between 1860 and „63 with an introduction by the historian Gino Longhitano (1989); Ricordi e lettere ai figli, a historical autobiography by Antonino Cimbali (1903), former mayor of Bronte in 1862, 1869, 1888, 1890; Rapporto sui fatti di Bronte del 1860 (1985) by Emanuele Bettini, a journalist whose work focuses on the Risorgimento; Risorgimento Perduto (1995) by the historian Antonio Radice, which posits the Risorgimento as a lost opportunity and makes available historical documents pertaining to Garibaldi‟s campaign in Sicily; and, finally, an exhibition of paintings depicting the events of 1860 by various Italian artists, organized and curated by the Bronte citizen Nunzio Sciavarello in 1988 (Associazione Bronte Insieme 21 September 2011). In addition to these texts, which focus primarily on the revolt and, in some cases, examine it within a broader history of the town, the 1985 trial in absentia of Bixio has been memorialized in two different publications. Il processo di Bronte by Nino Leanza (1985) is a historical account of the 1985 trial and Il processo a Bixio by Salvatore Scalia (1991) is a journalistic text that investigates the construction of the myths surrounding Bronte and Nino Bixio and that explores the motivations behind the twentieth century trial. Finally, since 2002 the Associazione di Bronte Insieme has maintained and updated the web site, <www.bronteinsieme.it> on which all of the “facts of Bronte” are available. The striking quantity and diversity of texts that narrate these events demonstrates that Bronte‟s is a contested history, one which continues to spur contemporary debate 4 about the lasting effects of the process of Italian unification and raises questions about Sicily‟s role in the Risorgimento. Having focused on the controversy of the circumstances leading up to and following the historical events, previous studies have overlooked the complexities within the narratives themselves. Bringing together what I refer to above as the “national” texts, my project interprets the implicit messages that emerge from their points of contact in rhetoric and form as that which drive the continued narrativization of the events. Beginning with an analysis of Verga‟s short story, Libertà (1882), moving into Radice‟s Nino Bixio a Bronte (1910), then Sciascia‟s essays, I fatti di Bronte (1960) and Verga e la Libertà (1963) and Vancini‟s film, Bronte: Cronaca di un massacro che i libri di storia non hanno raccontato (1972), and finishing up with Consolo‟s Il sorriso dell‟ignoto marinaio (1976), I examine the ways in which the formal and rhetorical polemic in which these texts engage concomitantly edifies and shatters the notion of a collective past while also contemplating the present. The underlying critical and theoretical questions debated within and amongst these stories address the relationship between literature, film and History: focusing on the cultural patrimony of realism and historical narrative, they explore place of the author-intellectual in society in both historical and contemporary settings.